Electronic Arts' recent attempt to "focus" Spore developer Maxis—which was a nicer way of saying some people got laid off—includes one of its more rant-ready folks, Chris Hecker, a Technology Fellow at the company. Remember him?

Word from Electronic Arts today is that Maxis, the studio behind The Sims and Spore, suffered…
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If not, he's probably best known—in addition to his contributions to Spore—for one of his Game Developers Conference talks, in which he described the Wii as "a piece of shit" and slammed Nintendo for its hardware design choices. He later apologized for those remarks.

He may also be recognized from his rant Do Your Job Well, Please, an editorial delivered at this year's GDC on video game journalism.

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By Hecker's estimate, the cutbacks at Maxis numbered 24 (he thinks). He estimates in his personal list of contributions to Spore that some 80 people were working on the game as development wrapped up.

Hecker announced on his personal site his follow up project, an indie game called SpyParty, which he describes as "a very different multiplayer espionage game" that apparently offers a level of excitement on par with ski jumping away from massive explosions.